A sudden, patent longing leaped to James Polder’s countenance.  Actually he stuttered with a surprised delight.  Damn it, there was nothing for him, Howat, to do but stare like a helpless idiot.  He ought to say something, second Mariana’s impudent invitation, at once.  She ignored him, gazing intently at the younger man.  He, too, meeting Mariana’s eyes, had apparently totally forgot the unimportant presence of Howat Penny.  And he had been married to his Harriet for a scant half year!  Howat Penny thought mechanically of the Polders’ depressing house, the odours of old cooking and cheap cigarettes, the feverish yapping of the silky animal, Cherette, with matted, pinkish eyes.  The precipitant, prideful, young fool!  Why hadn’t he held onto the merest memory, the most distant chance in the world, of Mariana, rather than fling himself, his injured self-opinion, into this stew?

“Don’t say it can’t be managed,” she persisted.  “Anything may.  It’s absolutely necessary; you can get a prescription—­two weeks of green valley and robins and country eggs.  Howat will take your money from you at penny sniff, and I’ll—­I’ll come out for dinner.”

“Harriet thought of going back to the family,” he replied; “but it might—­” he turned at last to Howat Penny.  “Would you have me?” he asked directly.  What, in thunder, choice of reply did he have?  Howat couldn’t point out the shamelessness of such an arrangement.  Harriet, it seemed, was not to be considered; just as if she were a merely disinterested connection.  He issued a belated period to the effect that Shadrach was spacious and Rudolph a capable attendant.  It was, he saw, sufficient.  “We can write,” said Mariana.  She endeavoured to caress Howat’s hand, but he indignantly frustrated her.

“I’ll have to get back to the hearth,” James Polder announced regretfully.  “It’s been wonderful,” he told Mariana Jannan.  Howat scraped his chair at the baldness of Polder’s pleasure.  “Your work is tremendous, Jim,” she replied; “the only stirring thing I have ever known in a particularly silly world.  But you mustn’t let it run you, too, into steel rails.  President Polder,” she smiled brilliantly at him.  “Why not?” queried James, the sanguine, at once defiant, haggard and intense.

XXXII

The following day Howat Penny was both weary and irritable.  Mariana declared, remorsefully, that she had selfishly dragged him away from Shadrach; and proposed countless trivial amends, which he fretfully blocked.  He had no intention of affording her such a ready escape from a sense, he hoped, of error and responsibility.  Before dinner, however, he found himself walking with her over the deep green sod that reached to the public road below.  A mock orange hedge enclosed his lawn, bounding the cross roads, the upper course leading to Myrtle Forge; and beyond they passed, on the left, the collapsed stone walls and fallen shingles of what, evidently, had been a small blacksmith’s shed.  Farther along they came to the sturdy shell of an old, single-room building, erected, perhaps, when Shadrach Furnace was new, with weeds climbing through the rotten floor, and a fragment of steps, rising to the mouldering peak of a loft, still clinging to a wall.